THE ROMANCE OF SYDNEY HARBOUR.

Lake County Press, Issue 1065, 21 May 1903, Page 3

THE ROMANCE OF SYDNEY HARBOUR.

"The Making of Pirates in the Convict Days" is the title of an article contributed to the current iss\:e of the "Windsor Magazine," by Louis Decke and Walter .leffery. Here is one of the incident* described : One dark night in May, 1808, as the brig Harrington lay at her moorings at Farm Cove, iu Sydney Harbour, a party of convicts rowed silently on board and made themselves masters of the vessel. When the dawn broke, her owner, whose house overlooked the Cove, looked out from his bedroom window and discovered that his brig had vanished ! A gun was fired, and the soldiers' drums bent, and in half an hour a small vessel called the Halcyon was manned, ten soldiers put on board of her, and despatched in pursuit. There was no doubt as to the reason of the disappearance of the Harrington, for one Robert Stewart, a notorious prisoner, and several of the gang who worked with him, were missing. With the Halcyon a whole fleet of small boats put to sea. to join in the chase, but there was then no wind, although a fresh breeze had been blowing all the night. ; and in consequence the Harrington was long out of sight before the flotilla reached the Heads. The small boats then returned to Sydney, and the Halcyon lay rolling helplessly on the long I'acific swell just outside. Towards evening two ship's boats came into port, and it can be imagined what excited crowds gathered along the harbour shores when the news spread that they were the Harrington's boats, in charge of Mr. Fish, the chief officer His tale was told as follows, in the old "Sydney Gazette" : "The brig was riding at two anchors, the ship's company in bed in the steerage, when Mr. Fish was suddenly awakened in his cabin by seeing two men at his bedside and feeling the cold barrel of a pistol to his forehead, a stern voice bidding him to be silent on pain of instant death. Meanwhile some of the party who were all well armed, had gone for'ard and overpowered the crew, while others slipped the cables and made sail. At seven in the morning the land was twenty miles distant, and Mr. Fish (the captain was sleeping on shore when the ship was seized) and his men were forced into two boats." The subsequent adventures of this band of pirates would take too long to .narrate in this article, but it may be mentioned that the Harrington was captured by an English man-of-war off the Philippine Islands, and brought to Calcutta. There arc many similar stories to this—the seizure of the yacht Alice, the mutiny of the brig Venus, are celebrated cases, and Brett's "Early New Zealand" has many tales to tell of mutinies and -piracies in the old colonial days. - AmV as we have said, all these other narratives can be found in books ; but what perhaps is newer matter is the ending of some of these "runaways" in the South Seas, many of whom rose to terrible notoriety for their crimes in the "Islands," while others lived respectable lives, made money as traders, were esteemed by white and brown men alike, and have left as their descendants a race of halfblooded people whose reputation as sailornicn is famous from the Hawaiian Islands in the North Pacific to the Friendly Archipelago in the South Pacific—"Weekly Telegraph."